Exhibit 1108 · Social-media thread (Twitter Files)
Twitter Files Part 8: How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon's Covert Online PsyOp Campaign (thread, 20 December 2022)
In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & “whitelist” abilities for the others.
Twenty-two-post thread. A government agency asked Twitter for special treatment of its own accounts: in 2017 a U.S. Central Command official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arabic-language accounts and asked for priority service, verification and 'whitelist' status; Twitter applied a whitelist tag the same day. The thread says Twitter executives knew in 2020 that Pentagon accounts used covert identities and did not suspend some of them until May 2022 or later. The author states Twitter 'had no input' into his reporting and that a Twitter attorney ran the searches, so what he saw could be limited. A Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika report of August 2022 is cited for the network.
- Source
- Lee Fang (@lhfang), Twitter thread
- Date
- 20 December 2022
- Quoted from
- Post 4 of 22 (Thread Reader copy of the thread of 20 Dec 2022)
- Grade
- Reported
- Document
- https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605292454261182464
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Reported: internal Twitter documents as selected, screenshotted and described by the thread's author after Twitter's owner gave the writers access; no complete archive is public and the one X capture opened (Part 1) rendered as an empty shell in the Wayback Machine, so the readable copy is the Thread Reader capture linked under archive (the posts themselves were not re-opened on X). The primary documents that would replace it are the underlying emails and Slack messages, which a court, Twitter or a regulator has not produced in full.